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Thursday, December 13, 2007

Its been 13 months and life is slowly getting back on a less rough road. Nothing much happened after the diagnosis of the eye problem. I had to wait an year for the nerves to settle down, we had less frequent visits to docs and fortunately less happening day to day events. The stamina and resistance of the body was slowly coming back and is still on its way up. My eyes still bother me sometimes and i am still dizzy on some days. Hopefully everything will die down in its own time. The prisms did not work out for me, so i am letting my eyes just get better on their own time.

My sis is getting married this Feb and I am hoping to make it to India then. Lets hope the new year brings better health, strength and confidence!

Friday, March 16, 2007

Well, we finally got to meet a neuro-ophthalmologist( there are only 4-5 of the species in the whole of Seattle area ). It took 2 months to see one. And he finally gave us somewhat good description of my eye problem. My third cranial nerve was damaged during the surgery, which is what causes the droopy lid. In most cases the nerve repairs almost completely and the lid function returns. But any nerve repair takes about 6-9 months. In the meantime, this third nerve damage has caused a condition called Exophoria. In simple terms, my right eye does not converge very well when i try to read or do anything which requires convergence of both eyes. This of course causes stress and dizziness.

So on most days i can only spend about 15 minutes at a time reading or online or doing anything which requires concentration . Of cource, i am trying to do all these things without concentrating so much, but u cant do that to read. i can type and probably do some daily activities with minimal eye use, but most are still restricted. The eye convergence can be corrected using prisms on my glasses, but the docs dont want to do that right now, since it might interfere with the nerve repair.

So here i am waiting and waiting for my nerve to heal itself so that i can start doing some things which usually would occupy 75 % of my day.

As i had mentioned in an earlier post that we engineers have a difficult time dealing with such situations without much control and explanations. Most of the the recovery problems do not usually have any explanation. This is true of a lot of medical problems. Along with all of this you have to also deal with the sudden missing independence. I can barely do my daily activities like cooking, reading, driving or anything. It sure is difficult to be suddenly so dependent. Well hopefully all this is temporary.!. Eyes are a very important part of your life for sure!!

Here's wishing my nerves a fast recovery! I am trying to find workarounds for certain activities for sure. Like i am using Key2Speak s/w to write up this blog. Because typing for me is not so concentration intensive, but reading what i typed up is. So this software just reads out whatever iam typing aloud. I can also read mails or webpages with it. So atleast i am not using my eyes so intensively!I am getting familiar with my kitchen slowly, so that i dont really need my eyes for every small thing. Ahh i miss driving though.

Monday, March 05, 2007

Happy Holi everyone!! (March 4)! Holi is the festival of colours, celebrated in India to celebrate the onset of Spring. It is a day to celebrate, have fun and socialize. We usually don't do much on Holi here in the US, but we have had crazy days when we were back home. Days of trying to scrub off the colors, the ones which would stick to your skin for a couple of days!!!

This year too, we did not do much. We used Haldi( turmeric ) instead of the usual holi colors and we ( vivek mom and me) had a small session of applying a ton of yellow on each other. Turmeric is very good for the skin and is usually an ingredient in many ayurvedic skin concoctions or cosmetics. So Vivek is definitely looking good today!

Recovery Update: My eyes got weird mid Jan, probably because the right eye started to open well and got used a lot. We had a vision field test and the right eye is much better now. The overall vision has gone from 20/40 b4 the surgery to 20/25 now after the surgery. The right eye's peripheral vision on the right side, which was almost blacked out is now getting better and i have a couple of blind spots instead of the complete black right semi-circle. But this also means that the vision in the right eye suddenly changed a lot, so the brain doesnt know what to do with it. Using the right eye started making me very dizzy mid jan and i could hardly read using both the eyes. The brain is slowly adjusting to it though and I can read a bit now and spend some time onine. Yey!!.. ok I cant even get too excited coz that adds to the dizziness.. heh!.

Monday, February 05, 2007

I have been out of action coz of a viral i caught, from a short trip to the alki beach last weekend. Some more posts coming later this week. the dizzyness got worse coz of the viral, so another reason to rest!

Feb 3rd was our 2nd wedding anniversary. We celebrated it quietly at home. Its been amazing 2 years with vivek!!!. Love you sweetie!!

Saturday, January 20, 2007

So heres the recovery update-We went to the physical therapist and she couldnt confirm that it was BPPV. Well she did some manoevers which made the dizzyness 20 times worse that day and 10 times worse for the next few days. So we started our own research, since our PCP was stuck on either BPPV or some vestibular infection. We went and met an Otolaryngologist (ENT (Ear nose throat)) doc for checkup of my vestibular system. She couldnt find anything wrong with the hearing, or infection anywhere, so she suggested and ENG exam, which will make you 100 times dizzy during the exam, and it will just confirm that there is probably something in the balance canals in the inner ear. The solution to which is anyway to wait it out for a couple of weeks. So why put myself thru more dizzyness. We are waiting it out anyway. The other option is that the Cerobrospinal Fluid (CSF) pressure in the brain might have increased a little or something. This can be detected by a lumbar puncture, which is a fairly invasive procedure.. huh!.

We are getting another opinion from a neuro-otologist(neuro+ ear speacialist), because the CSF part was just a speculation by our ENT doc.

Till then my graph still goes up a couple of days and down a couple. The right eye also opens more some days and doesnt work so well some days. The right eye will take another month or two to get completely better, and till then using that eye anyway makes me dizzy. Slowly my brain is getting used to all of this, so overall things are definitely getting better.

The other day, when i was trying to get my nurse at the neurosurgery clinic, to get me a referral for an otolaryngologist and she couldnt pronounce it and I could:):) This is some big exposure to the medical field:)